Winaityinaityi Pangkara — the bird sanctuary

Say the name slowly and it translates itself: Winaityinaityi Pangkara, Kaurna for “a country for all birds” — and the country that surrounds them. It is not a poetic flourish tacked onto a car park sign. It is the actual, legal name of a real place: a long reach of tidal flat and saltmarsh north of Adelaide, running from around the Port River estuary up past Thompson Beach and Buckland Park, proclaimed a national park in October 2016 as the Adelaide International Bird Sanctuary. To a driver on the Port Wakefield road it still looks like the same grey, mosquito-humming nothing as the rest of the samphire coast. In fact, it is one end of a piece of infrastructure that spans the globe.

Every spring, having flown south from the Arctic tundra of Siberia and Alaska down the East Asian–Australasian Flyway, tens of thousands of shorebirds put down on this mud to spend the southern summer fattening on its buried worms and crustaceans (DCCEEW 2016). Exactly how many is a harder question than it sounds, and worth asking honestly rather than skating over: one count puts the sanctuary’s shorebirds at around 15,000 birds of 52 species, 37 of them migratory; another puts the annual total closer to 27,000, including some 14,000 migratory birds across 14 species. The disagreement is not a scandal — it reflects different surveys, in different years, counting different stretches of a very large, muddy coast — but it is a useful lesson in its own right: a number repeated confidently enough starts to sound like a fact, and the honest answer here is “a great many, counted differently by different people,” not one tidy figure. What every count agrees on is the order of magnitude, and the destination. A grey plover satellite-tagged at Thompson Beach, inside the sanctuary’s reach, put a distance on that journey — north across the open ocean in a single leg of some seven thousand kilometres to the Yellow Sea, then on to breed on Wrangel Island, in the Russian Arctic, more than thirteen thousand kilometres from where it started (Li et al. 2025).

None of which happens without this particular stretch of mud staying intact, which is exactly the case a 2019 assessment of the flyway’s partner-site network makes for protecting places like this one deliberately: a shorebird’s survival depends on a chain of sites strung across two hemispheres, and Winaityinaityi Pangkara is the far southern link, doing the same essential work — fuel — as the tidal flats of the Yellow Sea or the tundra of the high Arctic. Proclaiming it a sanctuary did not create that value. It only wrote down, at last, what the birds had already been relying on for longer than anyone had thought to name it.